I was doing some obligatory Slashdot April 1st surfing (I swear their stories get crazier every year), and came across an article from a few days ago about “Attention Deficit Trait.” The basic idea is that some people do not have true ADD, but still suffer from an inability to think deeply or be productive when surrounded by distracting technologies, especially interrupting ones like cell phones and instant messenging. The guy who linked the article was critical, saying that of course people get distracted by distracting things, and that this phenomenon is not something new.
However, the article really hits home for me. The information age has dramatically increased our ability to distract ourselves with superficial communication. More than ever before, we can engage in busywork all day and get nothing significant done.
There are days when I have done nothing but surf the web and chat on AIM. There are other days when I have done nothing but hardcore coding, finishing an astounding amount of work that day in retrospect. On the hardcore days, AIM was not an issue. I either never logged on, or I was so focused on work that I avoided conversation.
The saddest part is, I know there are days that would have been hardcore, but I logged on to AIM (often for a benign reason such as to schedule an event later in the day or week, or to ask a coworker a work-related question) and ended up involved in six simultaneous conversations, which ground work to a complete halt.
I’m not saying there was no value in those conversations. Some of them strengthened friendships, gave advice to friends, or taught me something new. I do not claim I was afflicted completely by “ADT,” with no depth to these discussions whatsoever (although usually, one or two of the conversations is “deep” and the others are not; I am incapable of maintaining more than a couple “deep” conversations simultaneously). I’m just saying that the abundance of these technologies has sometimes impacted my productivity, which is unfortunate.
What scares me the most, though, is the thought that this mode of operation is permanently affecting my ability to think critically and to concentrate. I honestly feel more easily distracted than when I was younger. I now cannot read while someone is talking. I just can’t help listening to what is being said, and I stop absorbing the meaning of the words. I don’t read as much as I used to, since to do so I must be alone in a room. Watching subtitled anime is difficult, because when people talk during the show, I fail to grasp the currently displayed subtitles (sometimes the show’s audio even distracts me from the subs!). Even when no one is talking, I sometimes find myself silently repeating the text of the subtitles in my head, while utterly failing to comprehend the meaning. I also strongly suspect that I read much more slowly than in the past.
On the other hand, I listen to dance music all day with lyrics, and am still somehow able to read web sites, write blog entries, and furiously write code. So maybe it’s all just psychosomatic. I hope I can snap out of it.
“A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems.”
—Paul Erdos